Search This Blog

Monday, November 21, 2011

The Word Problem Committee…

Third grade math text books must be
written by “socially correct (SC)” committees without regard for clarity. That’s
the only possible explanation I can fathom when you come across examples like problems
#2 & #3 below:

(click to enlarge)

First draft: There are 28 people camping for the night and they
share 7 tents. How many people slept in each tent? (Answer: 4)

SC Member #1: Since this is for 3rd graders, shouldn’t
we somehow make it relevant and inclusive for them?

SC Member #2: Ok, sure. How ‘bout this:

There are 28 students camping for the
night and they share 7 tents. How many students sleep in each tent? (Answer: 4)

SC Safety Officer: Hummm, 28 unsupervised kids in the woods at
night? I don’t think that sends the correct message. Remember these are 3rd
graders and that might give them the wrong idea about being safe.

SC Member #1: Ok, Ok…Let’s do this:

There are 28 students and
their chaperones camping for the night and they share 7 tents. How many
people sleep in each tent? (Answer: 4)

SC Member #2: Wait a minute, doesn’t that change the answer? I mean
if each tent has 4 kids and one chaperone, that makes 5 people x 7 tents = 35 people not 28! Right?

SC Member #1:Oh!Good
catch. Let’s change the answer to ‘5’.

SC Member #2: I’m not sure that’s the best thing. Everyone knows
that 3rd graders don’t really “read the words” in word problems.
They tend to automatically take the numbers they see in the problem and divide:
28 divided by 7 = 4 as an answer.

SC Member #1: Well technically, it could be read
“28….studentsandchaperones” if you read it really, really fast and that means
that the “28 people” includes all the students AND chaperones together, right? Maybe
we could annotate the Teacher’s Edition (TE) reference to make the following notation:

Note to teacher: There are 28, not 35, total people out in the
woods that night. If you misinterpret the wording at this crucial point in the
word problem sequence and get an answer of ‘5’ instead of ‘4’, you’re screwed
when you attempt to answer the next question since we haven’t gotten to
fractions yet.

SC Safety Officer: What are the chances that the teacher will be
out for the day and the substitute teacher doesn’t have the TE Math book with
the “clarification notice”. That could be a problem!

SC Member #2: Let’s not do
the “Note to teacher” notice. It makes us look incompetent not being able to
write a simple 3rd grade math problem. Besides, the teachers will
figure it out on their own if we give them the correct answers to work backward
from.

3 comments:

Anonymous
said...

I admit it's poor wording, but it should say something like "every booth was filled, with 100 people total in the balcony."

The ideal of 100 people in one booth is ridiculous. As is the idea of 10k people on the balcony. Clearly, it should be one person per booth. So for this division problem, 100 people total (in the whole balcony, all the rows) divided by 10 booths per row = 10 total rows. Again, it's poor wording, but that's how they came up with 10 rows. Every booth was filled, with 100 people total, not every booth was filled with 100 people each.